
Shirey Lindenbaum, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, CUNY-Graduate Center, research in Papua New Guinea from 1961 to 2008. Her books include the time of AIDS: Social in Analysis, Theory and Method, co edited with Gilbert Herdt and Knowledge, Power and Practise: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life, co edited with Margaret Locke.
"This updated edition of Lindenbaum's classic, Kuru Sorcery, is a richly woven account of the multiple dimensions of the Kuru epidemic: the perspectives of the Fore who are so devastated by the scourge; the unfolding scientific understanding of its origin; the transformation of the Fore economy, religious rituals, and social life; and the motley cast of outsiders--missionaries, anthropologists, biomedical scientists, colonial administrators--whose presence in one way or another illuminated its causes and contributed to its end. Rarely has the long-term follow up of an ethnographic study produced so comprehensive and compelling a picture of the interplay of history, globalization, colonialism, and science. Foremost of its accomplishments is that we hear the voices, listen to the understandings, and vividly see the lived experience of the Fore themselves."
--Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University